The SharpDevelop community has released version 3.0 of the free open source .NET IDE. SharpDevelop (#Develop) features support for .NET 3.5, C#, VB.NET, F#, Code Completion, Auto Code Insert, Refactoring and others.
Code written in SharpDevelop 3.0 can be targeted at .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 featuring full MSBuild 3.5 support. A number of .NET languages are available:
- C# – with code completion and Windows Forms Designer
- VB.NET - with code completion and Windows Forms Designer
- Boo - with code completion and Windows Forms Designer
- IronPython – as an Add-in
- F#
For development productivity, SharpDevelop 3.0 provides Refactoring, Auto Code Inserting, Multi-core support. The application can be started from a USB memory stick. There is a series of testing/debugging tools integrated with the IDE:
- Integrated Debugger
- Code Analysis (FxCop)
- Unit Testing (NUnit)
- Code Coverage (PartCover)
- Integrated Subversion support (TortoiseSVN)
- StyleCop addin
Additional important features are:
- WiX Setup Projects
- Parser-based Code Converter
- XML Code Completion
- Documentation generation (Sandcastle, SHFB)
- Reflector addin
- VC++ project support
- Mono support
- Snippet Compiler
SharpDevelop 3.0 is freely available under GNU Library General Public License (LGPL). Microsoft also offers several editions of Visual Studio Express for free. One might choose SharpDevelop over VS Express for some features not available in the later like Mono support.
Useful links: Download page (source code and binaries), SharpDevelop web site, CodePlex mirror site, SharpDevelop Community site.
